Roulette History

As the roulette wheel turns and the numbers and the black and reds flash by, the whole history of the game flashes by as well.

While it is unclear exactly how long roulette (small wheel in French) has been around, claims of its antecedents are rumored to date back to ancient Rome where soldiers played on the wheels of their overturned chariots. Others place the game's roots in Tibet from where it was carried by Dominican monks to Europe. This game is played slightly differently as numbers were arranged in a square of 666. (All numbers on the outside of a roulette wheel add up to 666.) Additional theories claim that the game first appeared in traveling carnivals of the 1500s but evidence shows that these games only loosely resemble present-day roulette. Some even say that a monk in a French monastery invented the game to keep boredom at bay!

But for most gaming historians, it is Blaise Pascal (the mathematician who discovered probability theory) who invented the game back in 1657 while on vacation at a French casino.

Roly-poly, a similar game using a spinning ball and a rotating horizontal wheel as a gaming device, was recorded to have appeared in England in 1720 but was banned by England's gaming laws of 1739 and 1740. Various versions of the game using "evens" and "odds" were also outlawed in 1745.

It wasn't until the late 1700's that the first modern-day roulette wheel with black and red spaces appeared in France.

The roulette wheel, (with one 0), invented in 1842 by Frenchmen Louis and Francois Blanc, was first introduced in Hamburg, Germany as gambling was illegal at that time in France. When gambling was outlawed in Germany as well, Monte Carlo became the gambling Mecca. In the 1860s, Prince Charles III of Monaco gave permission to the Blanc brothers to design and build Casino de Monte Carlo, a luxurious casino, in the hope that it would bring economic relief to his kingdom. The Blanc version of roulette become known as European Roulette and it remains Monte Carlo's top gambling game. In 1891 the casinos were popularized in a song was written by Fred Gilbert.

Roulette crossed the Atlantic and was first introduced into New Orleans in the 1800s by French emigrants. The purpose of these casinos was to fleece the customers and therefore they paid smaller odds than acceptable. To combat these fly-by night casinos, new legitimate casino owners adopted the double zero wheel with set odds. Some roulette wheels even used an American eagle instead. To this day, this wheel with the double zero is called the American Roulette wheel. Although the game became even more popular during California's gold rush, it is the European version that is the most popular around the world.

In the mid 1990s online roulette games appeared on the internet for the first time, making the game of kings available to all.

Roulette is called the game of kings because it has been played by Kings and Queens all over the world, beginning with Charles of Monaco way back in the 1800s. Today, one can find roulette played in all casinos worldwide as well as from homes everywhere that are connected to the internet.